Firefox | Glenn Ward

Creating a Mac for Video production – Your software requirements

I’ll quickly touch on Hardware as i have had various builds with quite different results. I have 3 different builds on 4 machines, 2 MacPros with 1TB hard drives and 2 x Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz, 10 GB of RAM. Another MacPro with a HD and a 1TB raided, this is an extremely efficient machine as the software is running on the system drive and the video projects running from from the raid. Then 4th and currently my edit suite is a 2.26 GHz, Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 16 GB of RAM with a 500GB hard drive, faster access speed to the drive and I have never had any issues while editing, although the sometimes windows in the VMware runs a bit slow and the HD sounds like its going wild but that could be the configuration.

Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut pro? That is the question. I shall be honest, I was always a Final Cut person up until my latest role. The main reason we switched to Adobe was for better integration with the designer who already existed in the company. In the early stages there were problems, mainly with the quality of exports but that has greatly improved. If you could export to WMV on the Mac version that would be great! The workflow of Premiere is very efficient but I have not used Final Cut Pro for a while. You decide!

First things first, get Firefox web browser installed. I’ve not had too much experience with other browsers and video but firefox plugins seem to be a bit more readily available. Once installed and you’ve punched through your proxy (if you have one) install Video DownloadHelper. I’m often asked to download videos from various site such as YouTube for use in presentations and this plugin makes it real simple! If there’s something on the page that you can download the icon lights up and its a couple of clips to download.

Upgrade your QuickTime to QuickTime Pro, it’s essential and despite my opinion that it is not as good as it used to be, you won’t get away without it.

Get some codecs installed, Perian is my first choice and makes sure you can open many awkward video files. If your source files come from all over the place then get the MPEG-2 plugin for QuickTime installed, people still bring me mpg files and it’s not worth the time or effort sourcing another software (should come as standard) Get Flip4Mac on there, go all out and get the HD version you’re only going to upgrade it later otherwise. I’ve never had any playback issues in QuickTime and the output options are very flexible and unlike a few years ago WMVs are pretty good quality and a small file size.

I always have VLC installed, it allows us to view back .mts files shot on our camera kits without the need to bring them ink the edit, great for logging and an area QuickTime falls short. Get to grips with the export options, sometimes gets you out of a scrape when files don’t play on other players.

I use Handbrake for ripping DVDs into an editable format, despite trying to single handily educate the world of focus group facilities with the understanding that DVD recordings are output and they should get up to speed with recording techniques, I still get footage from all over the world as a DVD. We have however built our own viewing facility that can record direct to drive with VoIP access to the respondent area.

I also install DivX and DivX converter for playback and conversion, some recorders record in divx so it’s quite handy. Also allows you to open in QuickTime, do a quick save as and drag and drop the file into your edit.

I recently added the free Mpeg Streamclip when I had some files from Japan that I could not open in QuickTime this saved my bacon, there’s loads of nifty little programs like this and the recent addition of the Apple App store for your desktop makes it a lot easier to browse apps that the old website.

As I mentioned, I have had 2 edit suites hard drives die beyond recovery recently which resulted in a loss of work despite having Back up solution. Make sure you have a good backup solution in place, preferably with support.

Mobile Technology drives regular websites to use location data on their pages

I noticed the other day while looking online at the Cineworld website for local Cinemas that they had started to use location data in their web pages. I was on my iPhone and as I hit the Cinemas page the iPhone asked if it use my location. without physically entering a postcode or location the website displayed 3 closest cinemas. In this case I’m confident the website accessed the iPhones GPS hardware but as I discovered after a short Google, Geolocation browsing is just around the corner and uses IP address data to locate your position. I was quite surprised at how accurate this actually was, try Firefox Geolocation to see for yourself, also try out Google Latitude.

Despite in the example above, saving you one step in your browsing, making browsing and locating the data you need more efficient. Geolocation browsing has marketing and advertising implications. Like PPC Advertising with ability to target customers with specific advertising based on location, allowing websites to have your location data will mean the the adverts you will be presented with will be more likely to be of interest to you. From an advertisers point of view such as affiliate programs etc adverts will be served up more efficiently and improve conversion rates.

With websites such as Facebook and Browsers holding shed loads of information about you, Targeted Marketing is made easier and easier for advertisers. Already, as you browse through Facebook you will only see adverts based on your interest and keywords. Geolocation in browsers will make this more accurate and on the bright side, advertising won’t be so imposing on users as they surf the Internet. What’s next? instead of analysing your traffics data after they have visited you site, could you inteligently assess users as the page loads and dynamically serve up your pages based on their profile?

Also see post on Analytical Software.

Download flash video from the web to use in local projects using firefox add-ons

Although not strictly good practise to take video from the internet for use in your local projects it is something I am asked a lot about and how do I do it.

There are two stages to this, firstly the ability to download the file and secondly encoding the file for use. Thanks to various firefox addons downloading the files are not an issue. I use Video Download Helper as I have the most success with it from multiple sites. Recent improvements allow you to convert the file server side and download it although as this does not come packaged it means you need to install ffmpeg locally. To install ffmpeg on a windows machine follow the instructions in this link. For a Mac however watch this space as I am currently installing it. In the meantime I recomend the shareware ffmpegx, this provides a reasonable desktop solution. You will need to download some codecs but the location of these are shown on the softwares start up window. Save these down to a folder that you are not likely to change I have a folder called ffmpeg in my profile folder. Browse to these files at the start up screen and you are set to go.

Using Quicktime Pro
Once I have downloaded the flv I currently open it using QuickTime. To do this you will need to install perian, a codec bundle that improves the amount of video files that QuickTime can handle, while your at it go to Apples site > Quicktime and install as many codecs as possible too. Using Quicktime Pro (you will need to upgrade) you can export to most popular formats and even more if in the Quicktime Preferences under the Advanced tab you click Show Legacy Encoders and check the box. To export to windows media video I have flip4mac studio installed to export to wmv for presentations.